The pamphlet found its way South, and was the cause of no little
commotion among the master-class. It was looked upon as an instigation
to servile insurrection. The "Appeal" was proscribed, and a price put
upon the head of the author. Garrison deprecated the sanguinary
character of the book. For he himself was the very reverse of Walker.
Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance
as enunciated by Jesus. He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of
every description, as wicked and inhuman. He sang to the slave:

"Not by the sword shall your deliverance be;
Not by the shedding of your master's blood,
Not by rebellion--or foul treachery,
Upspringing suddenly, like swelling flood;
Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good.
God's _time is best_!--nor will it long delay;
Even now your barren cause begins to bud,
And glorious shall the fruit be!--watch and pray,
For lo! the kindling dawn that ushers in the day."

He considered "Walker's Appeal" "a most injudicious publication, yet
warranted by the creed of an independent people." He saw in our
Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an
instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to
go and do likewise. If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in
rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong
were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their
freedom. It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who
apotheosized force, to condemn them. What was sauce for the white man's
goose was sauce for the black man's gander.

The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an
express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their
masters. The contents of the _Liberator_ were quite as likely to produce
a slave insurrection as was "Walker's Appeal," if the paper was allowed
to circulate freely among the slave population. It was, in fact, more
dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the
pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the
peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the _Liberator_ in its
seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves
are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the
tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a
message, which every slave, however ignorant an